One of my favorite vim plugins is https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim , which can open a pane showing the actual tree of versions,

One of my favorite vim plugins is https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim , which can open a pane showing the actual tree of versions, including at what time the version changed. j and k can move around in the tree, and the pane with the file will show what it was at a given time. I've definitely used it to pull out a version of a file as it existed an hour ago...